The Oscars This Year Were Actually Kind of Good

I’m not sure anyone could have had “Glenn Close shaking her butt to ‘Da Butt’ from Spike Lee’s School Daze’” on their Oscars 2021 bingo card. But it happened at last night’s 93rd Academy Awards—an event revamped for the COVID-era. 

In a mid-pandemic world, there’s no way the Oscars could proceed like usual. Skipping the virtual format that flopped for the Golden Globes, the Oscars went for an in-person event with strict COVID safety rules. Instead of upwards of 3,000 people at Dolby Theater, the 170 attendees at Los Angeles’ Union Station were “vaxxed, tested, re-tested, [and] socially distanced,” as One Night in Miami director Regina King explained, and instructed to treat the event like a movie set. The smaller crowd combined with a new, storytelling-focused format made the event seem more intimate, relaxed, and even a little weird, for better and for worse.

There were satisfying wins. With Nomadland’s awards in the Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Actress (Frances McDormand) categories, Chloe Zhao and her film about a woman who loses everything in the Great Recession made history: Zhao became the first woman of color—and only the second woman—to win Best Director in the award show’s 93-year run. Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal—which follows a heavy metal drummer who loses his hearing—earned fitting recognition with the Sound and Editing awards. Yuh-Jung Youn, who was beloved for her role as the foul-mouthed grandmother in Minari, won Best Supporting Actress; Daniel Kaluuya, who was in the running for the award alongside co-star Lakeith Stanfield, won Best Supporting Actor for playing Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah.

A new format for presentation made each award feel more satisfying. By moving musical performances to the pre-show and once again eschewing a host for the event, presenters could share more information and memories about nominees. The result came off like genuine appreciation and an earnest spotlight on creators in an industry that’s been hit hard by the pandemic. Maybe it’s just the languishing feeling of the world right now, but watching people be recognized for their hard work—and getting a chance to publicly show their joy, and take the stage for a few moments—felt even more special this year. 

Still, the awards fell flat in other ways. Some social media users have taken issue with the loss of James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham’s Crip Camp, a documentary about the disability rights movement, to Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s My Octopus Teacher. Others highlighted that the order of the awards, with Best Director early in the ceremony, downplayed Chloe Zhao’s accomplishments. Perhaps the most glaring issue was the fact that the awards built toward the suggestion that Chadwick Boseman would posthumously be awarded Best Actor for his role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; the Oscars even included NFT tributes to the actor in its gift bags.

Instead, we got an ending so unsatisfying that many people have called it the exact opposite feeling of the Moonlight/La La Land mix-up. When it came to the event’s final award, Joaquin Phoenix announced a surprising winner: Anthony Hopkins, for his role in The Father. But since Hopkins wasn’t there in-person or virtually, the whole thing simply cut to credits, leaving Twitter feeds a sea of unanswered uhhhs and whats. 

From Glenn Close’s unexpected dance session, to Harrison Ford presenting the Best Editing award with the same enthusiasm as a man stuck at the DMV with the sloths from Zootopia, to Yuh-Jung Youn giving the night’s best acceptance speech by both ripping on people who mispronounce her name and hitting on Brad Pitt, to that ending, this year’s awards brought a very particular pandemic energy to the event. They were simultaneously joyful and weepy, but also a bit disenchanted with the pomp and circumstance of the whole affair. 

Though the changes this year were forced by the pandemic, this year’s awards—like the Grammys and the Golden Globes and, well, just about all big events recently—proved that maybe the ceremony doesn’t need to be bound to its usual format. As we’ve learned over the pandemic, we don’t have to be tied to the same ways we’ve always done things, and that change can be good. While the Oscars will probably come back bigger and flashier in the future, this year’s slightly-more-lowkey event was a reminder that, in some ways, we’ve inflated the importance of the Oscars. Stripping away some of its excess made it easier to see the event for what it really is: a work party among colleagues, meant to celebrate each other’s successes.